Spaceport America on OpenStreetMap

By SamatJanuary 11, 2012 - 6:29pm

[flickr-photo:id=6639706995,size=m]

Spaceport America is “the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport”. Wonder what it looks like? You can now find it on OpenStreetMap, one of the many things I’ve been mapping in New Mexico’s barren & isolated Jornada del Muerto. I’ve indicated various Spaceport America structures, like the state-of-the-art Terminal Hangar Building and Spaceport Operations Center. I’ve yet to accurately locate Spaceport America’s vertical launch pad, which has been in use since 2007.

No, it’s not on Bing Maps, Google Maps, or any of the other Web mapping competitors—just in case you needed a reason why crowd-sourced geodata (or VGI) can’t be beat.

Want an aerial photo of Spaceport America? Over on Flickr I’ve a screencap from the USDA’s public-domain NAIP 2011 release, pretty much the only source for high-resolution imagery of the middle of nowhere.